I Choose To Be

Today, I see pictures in my mind, of many days and times I left behind me on this road called life. There were good things and bad things in my yesterdays, and they are part of who and what I am today.

I choose to be a better me, because of the things that have happened to me in the past. I took the memories of the bad in my yesterdays and thanked the Lord for giving me these things that helped me be a better me today. The lessons I learned over the years come from the negative in my life as well as the positive, and it is the sum total of these two things that have helped me make a choice about the kind of person I am.

We look at life the way we choose, and from birth to death we'll win or lose, depending how we use the things that teach us by bringing us pain, sorrow or happiness and contentment. With these experiences, we can turn the bad times into good, and let them make us better as really, they should.

We can learn from them, and finding a positive outlook taken from things that happen in our past causing pain in our lives, brings us to a place within us that allows us to choose the next path we take in life. It can free us up to look at life as it is, good and bad, happy and sad, and will give us wings to fly instead of crawling through life, holding onto the pain and allowing it to define who we are.

I can be happy for all the strife, because it frees me up to look at life in a better way, making good decisions that make me happy as a result. Armed with these lessons learned, I take the bad things that happened to me and from them, have learned to be the best I can be.

I learn more every day because of my yesterdays. I learned how to smile, how to laugh. how to forgive and how to love. I learned the importance of taking a negative experience, looking at it deeply and openly, and then to understand that it can impact my life daily in the way I choose it to.

The person that I am is dependent not only on my past experiences, but how I choose to digest them and then what I choose to do with them after that. I can be a victim, or a wallflower, or I can choose to be better than those things. I can go through life feeling sorry for myself, or I can be free, free of all the chains that bind a person who can only take from what they have experienced, and cry about their yesterdays.

I can smile, and be happy and say thank you to those that hurt me and made me cry, because it is those things and those people who have helped me choose to be a better me.

There have been many things in my life that caused me a great deal of pain, lots of sorrow, anger, and resentment, and contributed to more loss on my part as a result. Those "bad" things that happened to me, some very bad, turned me into a frightened, self centered, and unhappy adult. I didn't trust anyone with my heart, or my real thoughts. I refused to accept that I had needs, because every time I acted on those needs, I got hurt, rejected and ended up alone. It didn't take me long to see the world as I did, a painful and unhappy place to be.

When I made a friend, I would tell them about all the bad things that happened to me, because after all, isn't that what friends are for? You tell each other everything. Trouble was there was so little good in my life that all I talked about was the bad. And funny thing, every time a made a friend, they ended up walking away. I didn't understand why back then. I only knew that to have a friend, a real friend, was impossible. No one could understand me. I felt as though no one really tried. I thought they were so busy with themselves they had no time for me. And so I went through friend after friend, always thinking that people were so selfish they only had time for themselves, their thoughts and their needs.

And then one day, I made a new friend. She was different than what I was used to. She heard me. She stopped and listened. And she was always happy. That was one of the first things I noticed about her. When she spoke of her todays or her yesterdays, she made it sound as though nothing bad had ever happened to her, and she kept on listening to my tales of my past. I would tell her something that happened to me that was bad, and she would tell me how she was so sad that I had to go through that particular thing. She was always consoling me, feeling bad for me, but unlike all my other friends, she stuck around.

One day I couldn't help it. I just had to ask her how she managed to go through life without anything bad happening to her. She never spoke of anything, so I just assumed she had had a happy life, no bad, just lots of happy.

She smiled at me, and said, "You know, funny thing, my life was not happy at all growing up. My mother was a drunk, and when she drank, she would get mad and beat me. By the time I was 10, I had had broken bones 14 different times. My dad stayed away most of the time. He said he couldn't stand being around my mother and watching her beat me, so rather than stay and help me, he would just disappear for awhile.

One time, while he was gone, my mom brought a man home from the bar she had been at that night. They kept drinking and she fell asleep, and while she was sleeping, the man came in to my bedroom and raped me. I was nine then, and he was mean and he hurt me badly. Today I can't have children because of him. When my mom woke up, he was gone and I was in the living room crying.

She saw my bruises, and started screaming at me that it was my fault he was gone. I told her that he hurt me, and she laughed, and then she got mad. She beat me again. At that point, I had no fight left in me, and I just stopped crying, covered my head and let her beat me. She broke two bones that day, and finally CPS came and took me away.

I grew up in the foster system, one home after another, until finally I was taken in by the foster mother who is my adopted mother today. She taught me. She taught me how to love, and how to trust and how to take all of my yesterdays, and put them where they belonged, in what she called the learning booth.

She taught me that there's a hero in me, born of my pain and sorrow, and how to look hard and deep within myself, and find my truth. She said that I could have a new look, a new way to be because of my past and the reality of my life.

She taught me that to take the good and leave the bad behind, it would then not hurt me anymore, and it would teach me every day, how to be better than all of my past experiences. The bad then would contribute to the good adult I would grow to be. "You see," she said, "the bad that you've gone through will help you to be a better person if you let it. You can learn not to repeat those bad things in your life. You can choose to not do the things that were done to you, to others and accept them for what they are, yesterdays lessons."

The path you take in life is up to you. You have all you need to decide who you want to be. All of your yesterdays, bad and good go with you through life. I hope you choose to be a better you, because it is a much happier place to be, and your children will thank you too.